Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  Starbuck’s spirits sank. It was bad enough that the army was yielding Manassas Junction to the Yankees, but everyone had been cheered by the sudden news that a southern secret weapon, an iron-sided ship impervious to cannon fire, had sailed into the Hampton Roads and decimated the northern blockading squadron of wooden warships. The U.S. Navy’s ships had turned and fled, some going aground, others sinking, and the rest simply making what desperate speed they could to escape the clanking, smoke-dark, plodding, but vengeful Virginia, the ironclad fashioned from the hulk of an abandoned U.S. Navy ship, the Merrimack. The victory had seemed compensation for Manassas’s abandonment and promised to destroy the strangulation of the U.S. Navy’s blockade, but now it seemed that the North had a similar beast which had succeeded in fighting the CSS Virginia to a standstill.

  “Never mind, Nate. We’ll just have to settle the war on land,” Bird said, then clapped his hands to encourage the last of the men to leave the burning railyard and form up on the road leading south.

  “But how in God’s name did they know we had an iron ship?” Starbuck asked.

  “Because they have spies, of course. Probably hundreds of them. You think everyone south of Washington suddenly changed their patriotism overnight?” Bird asked. “Of course they didn’t. And some folks undoubtedly believe that any accommodation with the Yankees is better than this misery.” He gestured toward another group of pitiful refugees and was suddenly assailed by an image of his own dear wife being forced from her home by the invading Yankees. That was hardly a likely fate, for Faulconer County lay deep in the heart of Virginia, yet Bird still touched the pocket in which Priscilla’s portrait was carefully wrapped against the rain and damp. He tried to imagine their small house with its untidy piles of music and its scatter of violins and flutes being burned by jeering Yankee troops.

  “Are you all right?” Starbuck had seen the sudden grimace on Bird’s face.

  “Enemy horse! Look lively!” Sergeant Truslow shouted at his company, but he also intended the sudden bellow to startle Major Bird out of his reverie. “Yankees, sir.” Truslow pointed north to where a group of horsemen was silhouetted against the pale trunks of a far wood.

  “March on!” Bird shouted toward the head of the Legion’s column, then he turned back to Starbuck. “I was thinking of Priscilla.”

  “How is she?” Starbuck asked.

  “She says she’s very well, but she wouldn’t say anything else, would she? The dear girl isn’t one to worry me with complaints.” Bird had married a girl half his age and, in the manner of a confirmed bachelor falling at last to the enemy, regarded his new bride with an adoration that verged on worship. “She says she’s planted onions. Is it too early to plant onions? Or maybe she means she planted them last year? I don’t know, but I am so impressed that the dear thing knows about onions. I don’t. Lord knows when I’ll see her again.” He sniffed, then turned to look at the distant horsemen who seemed very wary of the lavish display of wooden guns that threatened their approach. “Onward, Nate, or backward rather. Let us yield this field of ashes to the enemy.”

  The Legion marched past the burning storehouses, then through the small town. A few of the houses were empty, but most of the inhabitants were staying behind. “Hide your flag, man!” Bird called to a carpenter who was defiantly flying the new Confederate battle flag above his shop. “Fold it away! Hide it! We’ll be back!”

  “Is anyone behind you, Colonel?” The carpenter inadvertently gave Bird a promotion.

  “Just some cavalry. After that it’s all Yankees!”

  “Give them bastards a good whipping, Colonel!” the carpenter said as he reached for his flag.

  “We’ll do our best. Good luck to you!”

  The Legion left the small town behind and marched stolidly along a wet and muddy road that had been torn apart by the passage of refugee wagons. The road led to Fredericksburg, where the Legion would cross the river, then destroy the bridge before joining the bulk of the southern army. Most of that army was retreating on a road farther west which went direct to Culpeper Court House where General Johnston had his new headquarters. Johnston was assuming that the Yankees would swing wide in an attempt to turn the river line and that a great battle would therefore need to be fought in Culpeper County; it would be a battle, Bird observed to Starbuck, which would make the fight at Manassas look like a skirmish.

  The Legion’s retreat took them through that old battlefield. To their right was the long hill down which they had fled in disorder after stalling the Yankees’ surprise attack, and to their left was the steeper hill where Stonewall Jackson had finally held, turned, and repelled the northern army. That battle was eight months in the past, yet still the steep hill showed the scars of artillery strikes. Close by the road was a stone house where Starbuck had watched the surgeons slash and saw at wounded flesh, and in the yard of the house was a shallow grave trench that had been washed thin by the winter’s rain so that the knobbly-headed stumps of bones showed white above the red soil. There was a well in the yard where Starbuck remembered slaking his thirst during the day’s terrible, powder-exacerbated heat. A group of stragglers, sullen and defiant, now squatted beside the well.

  The stragglers, all of them from regiments that were marching ahead of the Legion, annoyed Truslow. “They’re supposed to be men, ain’t they? Not women.” The Legion passed more and more such laggards. A few were sick and could not help themselves, but most were simply tired or suffering from blistered feet. Truslow snarled at them, but even Truslow’s savage scorn could not persuade the stragglers to ignore the blood filling their boots and to keep on marching. Soon some of the men from the Legion’s leading companies began dropping back. “It ain’t right,” Truslow complained to Starbuck. “Go on like this and we’ll lose half the army.” He saw three men from the Legion’s A Company and he stormed over to them, bellowing at the chickenhearted bastards to keep walking. The three men ignored him, so Truslow punched the tallest of the three, dropping him to the ground. “Get up, you son of a bitch!” Truslow shouted. The man shook his head, then squirmed in the mud as Truslow kicked him in the guts. “Get up, you slime-bellied bastard! Up!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Stop it!” Starbuck called the order to Truslow, who turned in astonishment at receiving a direct reprimand from his officer.

  “I ain’t letting these sons of bitches lose the war because they’re gutless weaklings,” Truslow protested.

  “I don’t intend to allow that to happen either,” Starbuck said. He walked over to the man from A Company, watched by a score of other stragglers who wanted to see just how the tall, dark-haired officer could succeed where the squat, fierce sergeant had failed.

  Truslow spat into the mud as Starbuck approached. “You plan on talking reason to the sumbitch?”

  “Yes,” Starbuck said, “I do.” He stood above the fallen man, watched by the whole of K Company, who had paused to enjoy the confrontation. “What’s your name?” Starbuck asked the straggler.

  “Ives,” the man said warily.

  “And you can’t keep up, Ives?”

  “Reckon I can’t.”

  “He always was a useless sumbitch,” Truslow said. “Just like his pa. I tell you, if the Ives family were mules you’d have shot the whole damn lot at birth.”

  “All right, Sergeant!” Starbuck said reprovingly, then smiled down at the wet, miserable Ives. “You know who’s following us?” he asked.

  “Some of our cavalry,” Ives said.

  “And behind the cavalry?” Starbuck asked gently.

  “Yankees.”

  “Just hit the no-good bastard,” Truslow growled.

  “You leave me alone!” Ives shouted at the Sergeant. Ives had been emboldened by Starbuck’s gentle and considerate manner and by the support of the other stragglers, who murmured their resentment of Truslow’s brutality and their appreciation of Starbuck’s reasonable tone.

  “And do you know what the Yankees will do to you?” Star
buck asked Ives.

  “Reckon it can’t be worse than this, Captain,” Ives said.

  Starbuck nodded. “So you can’t go on?”

  “Reckon I can’t.”

  The other stragglers murmured their agreement. They were all too tired, too pained, too wet, too desperate, and too unhappy even to think of continuing the march. All they wanted was to collapse beside the road, and beyond that thought of immediate rest they had no cares or fears.

  “You can stay here then,” Starbuck told Ives.

  Truslow growled in protest. The other stragglers grinned with pleasure as Ives, his battle apparently won, struggled to his feet.

  “There is just one other thing,” Starbuck said pleasantly.

  “Captain?” Ives was eager to please now.

  “You can stay here, Ives, but I can’t let you keep any equipment that belongs to the government. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? We don’t want to give the Yankees our precious guns and uniforms, do we now?” He smiled.

  Ives was suddenly wary. He shook his head very cautiously, but clearly he did not really understand what Starbuck was saying.

  Starbuck turned to his company. “Amos, Ward, Decker, come here!” The three men ran over to Starbuck, who nodded toward Ives. “Strip the gutless bastard naked.”

  “You can’t…” Ives began, but Starbuck took one pace and thumped him in the belly, then brought his other hand up to slap his head hard back. Ives collapsed in the mud again.

  “Strip him!” Starbuck said. “Cut the bastard’s clothes clean off.”

  “Jesus Christ,” one of the other stragglers blasphemed in disbelief as Starbuck’s men ripped and tore Ives’s clothes away. Truslow, grinning now, had taken the man’s rifle and ammunition. Ives was screaming that he wanted to stay with the Legion, but Starbuck knew he needed to make an example of one man, and it was Ives’s misfortune to be that man. Ives thrashed and fought, but he was no match for Starbuck’s men who pulled off his boots, his pack, and his blanket roll, dragged his pants down, and cut away his jacket and shirt. Ives was left in nothing but a grimy pair of frayed drawers. He staggered to his feet, blood oozing from the blow Starbuck had given his nose.

  “I’ll keep going, Captain!” Ives pleaded. “Really I will!”

  “Take your drawers off,” Starbuck said harshly.

  “You can’t!” Ives backed away, but Robert Decker tripped him, then leaned over and ripped the frayed undergarment away to leave Ives stark-naked in the rain and mud.

  Starbuck looked at the other stragglers. “If any one of you wants to stay here and get acquainted with the Yankees, then get undressed now! If you don’t, then get walking.”

  They all began walking. Some exaggerated their limps to show that they had genuine cause to be laggards, but Starbuck shouted that he could strip a cripple far faster than he could rip the clothes off a whole man, and that encouragement made the stragglers walk faster. Some even half ran as they hurried to get clear of Starbuck and Truslow, spreading the word as they went that there was no mercy to be had at the rear of the Legion’s column.

  Ives pleaded for his clothes. Starbuck drew his pistol. “Get the hell away from here!”

  “You can’t do this!”

  Starbuck fired. The bullet splashed mud onto Ives’s fish-belly-white calves. “Run!” Starbuck shouted. “Go to the Yankees, you son of a bitch!”

  “I’ll kill you!” Ives shouted. He was running now, splashing jaybird-naked down the road toward Manassas. “I’ll kill you, you Yankee bastard!”

  Starbuck holstered the revolver and grinned at Truslow.

  “You see, Sergeant? Sweet reason always works, every time.”

  “You’re a smart son of a gun, ain’t you?”

  “Yes, Sergeant, I am. Forward now!” Starbuck called to the company and they marched on, grinning, while Truslow handed out Ives’s ammunition. The number of stragglers dropped to a handful, and that handful seemed composed of men who were genuinely crippled. Starbuck had his men take their weapons and cartridges, but otherwise left them alone. There were no more malingerers.

  In the early afternoon the Legion trudged past what had once been the largest meat-curing factory in the Confederacy, but was now an inferno of yellow and blue flames. Fat hissed and crackled and sent molten streams pouring down through the hovels where the factory’s slaves lived. The Negroes watched the soldiers pass and betrayed not a flicker of emotion. Soon, they knew, the northerners would come, but they dared show no pleasure at that prospect. Children clung to their mothers’ aprons, the men watched from shadows, while behind them the burning meat roasted and fried to send a tantalizing aroma of beef and bacon across a wide swath of damp country.

  The smell of bacon stayed with the Legion right into the middle of the afternoon when the cavalry rearguard at last caught up with the retreating infantry. The troopers dismounted and led their tired, sweat-whitened horses by the reins. Some of the troopers had no saddles and were using folded squares of heavy cloth instead, while others had bridles made of knotted ropes. The men scanned the road verges as they walked south, looking for anything useful among the equipment that had been thrown aside by the infantry battalions ahead. There were coats, tents, blankets, and weapons, all of them taken from the stores abandoned at Manassas, but then found to be too heavy to carry and so simply thrown away. The Legion’s dogs gorged themselves on food that had been snatched from the burning depots but that now was being jettisoned as the men’s weariness increased. “It feels more like a defeat than a retreat,” Starbuck grumbled to Thaddeus Bird.

  “I believe the textbooks describe it as a tactical withdrawal,” Bird said with relish. He was enjoying the day. The sight of so much material being burned was proof of the essential idiocy of mankind and especially that portion of mankind which was in authority, and Bird always enjoyed such proofs of general stupidity. Indeed his enjoyment was so great that he sometimes felt guilty for it. “Though I don’t suppose you ever feel guilty, do you, Starbuck?”

  “Me?” Starbuck was startled by the question. “All the time.”

  “For enjoying the war?”

  “For being a sinner.”

  “Ha!” Bird liked that confession. “You mean that blacksmith’s wife in Manassas? What a fool you are! To feel guilty for doing what is natural? Does the tree feel guilty for growing? Or the bird for flying? Your fault is not the commission of sins, Starbuck, but your fear of loneliness.”

  That cut too close to the bone, so close that Starbuck ignored the comment altogether. “Your conscience is never tender?” he asked Bird instead.

  “I never allowed my conscience to be confused by the bleating of God’s ministers,” Bird said. “I never listened long enough, you understand. Good Lord, Starbuck, if it had not been for this war you might well be an ordained man of God by now! You’d be marrying people instead of killing them!” Bird laughed, jerking his head back and forth, then suddenly turned as a rifle fired far behind the Legion. A bullet whipped through the trees and the dismounted rebel cavalry immediately turned to meet the threat. A troop of Yankee horsemen had appeared in the distance. The rain made the enemy difficult to see, though every now and then a puff of white smoke betrayed the spot where a carbine had been fired. The sound of the gun would come flat and dull a few seconds later, just after the bullet had slapped into the wet road or flicked harmlessly through the pine needles. The northern cavalry was firing at very long range, relying on luck rather than marksmanship for any effect.

  “This calls for your fellows, Nate,” Major Bird said with an unholy relish. Bird had firm beliefs about musketry. He liked to hold his regimental volleys until the very last moment and he believed his skirmishing companies should be sharpshooters, and Starbuck’s insistence on constant practice had made K Company into the Legion’s most lethal skirmishers. A handful of the men, like Esau Washbrook and William Tolby, were natural marksmen, but even the most inept members of the company had improved in the months of training. Joseph May was
one of the inept men, though in his case the improvement in his marksmanship was owed to the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that had been taken from a dead Yankee captain at Ball’s Bluff.

  Major Bird now stared down the long road that led straight between dark evergreen trees. “One well-aimed volley, Nate. The rascals won’t risk coming close, and once they know we can shoot they’ll drop even farther back, so the omnipotent, all-seeing God is only giving us one chance to send their miserable souls to hell.” He rubbed his thin hands. “Would you be offended if I gave the orders, Nate?”

  Starbuck, amused by Bird’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm, assured his commanding officer that no offense would be taken, then told his company to find themselves firing positions and to load their rifles. There were about a dozen Yankee cavalrymen in sight, but more were probably hidden by the ruins of a clapboard tavern which stood at the bend in the road where the enemy had appeared. The northerners were firing their carbines from their saddles in the evident belief that they were too far from the rebel rearguard to be in real danger. Their fire was not so much a threat as a mockery, a parting, derisive gesture to the retreating rebels. The Confederate cavalry were firing back, but their makeshift collection of revolvers, sporting guns, and captured carbines was proving even more inaccurate than the northern gunfire.

  “A quarter mile!” Truslow shouted. That was very long range for the Legion’s rifles. As a rule Starbuck reckoned that shots fired at distances greater than two hundred yards were probably wasted unless one of the company’s best marksmen was firing, but a quarter mile was not an impossible distance. He loaded his own rifle, first biting the bullet off the top of the paper-wrapped cartridge, then pouring the powder down the barrel. He stuffed the empty paper into the barrel as wadding, then spat the bullet into the muzzle. The bitter, salty taste of gunpowder lingered in his mouth as he pulled out the rifle’s steel ramrod. He thrust the cone-shaped bullet hard down onto the wadding and powder, then slotted the ramrod back into its place. Finally he fished out a small copper percussion cap that he fumbled over the rifle’s breech cone. The cap was filled with a pinch of fulminate of mercury, a chemical unstable enough to explode when struck sharply. The rifle’s hammer, cracking on the cap, would cause the fulminate to explode and so lance a needle of fire down through the pierced cone into the gunpowder he had rammed into the rifle’s breech.